Thousands of people will receive a devastating medical diagnosis this year. And for most, what follows is a nightmare of anger, shame, loneliness and passivity. Instead of being encouraged to take a lead role in orchestrating their finales, they are expected to wait patiently for the curtain to fall. The Amateur’s Guide is on the cutting edge of death and dying work. It provides an opportunity to break free from the painful silence our culture imposes on death talk. Whether filling out a durable power of attorney form, completing a death anxiety survey or personally designing a unique end-of-life plan, you will be totally involved and engaged. This unique seminar/support group format exposes you to a myriad of life situations and moral dilemmas that arise as one faces his/her mortality head on. Learn from and with people just like you. Ten diverse fictional characters provide essential role models for enhancing life near death. Additionally, six presenters, experts in their field, offer timely advice to help make the end of life less intimidating and more of a rich, poignant transition. This is about achieving a good and wise death in the context of real dying, with all its unpredictability, disfigurement, pain, and sorrow. This workbook is primarily for those currently facing their mortality. But concerned family and friends, healing and helping professionals, lawyers, clergy, teachers, students, and those grieving a death will all benefit from joining in. Because, as we all know, none of us is getting out of here alive.

Secrecy, Sophistry and Gay Sex In The Catholic Church

For centuries homosexuals have been vilified and persecuted by the Catholic Church, but the Church has always had a very inconvenient secret.  Many of its clergy, even those in the highest echelons of the Church, were and are homosexual.  Little was known of the lives these religious people lived until the publication, in 1981, of the groundbreaking, i>Gay Catholic Priests; A Study of Cognitive and Affective Dissonance.
     Richard Wagner is the author of that study and he is a gay priest. The media firestorm that erupted after its publication and the backlash within his religious community because of its publication eventually destroyed his public priesthood.  This story of his 13-year battle with the Church to save his ministry exemplifies the spiritual isolation, emotional distress and ecclesiastical reprisals every gay priest most fears.
     Secrecy, Sophistry And Gay Sex In The Catholic Church provides an intimate and sometimes disturbing look into the unseemly inner-workings of the Catholic Church.  It is a detailed account of the Church's take-no-prisoners attitude in stamping out whatever they perceive as a threat, especially if the threat comes from within.